Creating Opportunities for Disadvantaged Honeybees
Habitat for Honeybees is a non-profit association located near Golden Gate Park and Ocean Beach in San Francisco, California.
We are dedicated to capturing feral bees and relocating them into mutually beneficial habitats. The world is a better place when bees are allowed to thrive and pollinate in organic farms and neighborhood gardens, rather than stow away in residential rafters or sneak through the crack in your ceiling skylight.
If you find yourself in the midst of a swarm of ten thousand bees, relax. Bees swarm when they've outgrown their hive, stuffed themselves with honey and taken to finding a new home. Without a hive to defend, they're not likely to sting. If they need to be captured, this is the easiest time to do so. Once they find an empty space behind your bathroom wall, they're not going to leave even if you ask nicely.
You can ask us nicely and we'll remove them. Swarm removal from a garden box or tree in a yard is free, done with a bee-friendly vacuum that gently removes the bees without hurting them. We have plenty of experience, equipment and skills to minimize yours' and your neighbors' fears.
Removing honeybees living inside structures is a whole other story. We can remove hives from inside residential rafters and other easy-to-get-to places with minimal structural impact for a small fee. For more complicated cut-outs, we'll refer you. Our professional colleagues have extensive experience removing colonies from tall hard-to-reach sites, such as many-storied retail structures constructed of impenetrable cinder block. So please don't spray! Save the poison chemicals for yellow jackets.
Once dislodged, we house the wild bees into one of our hand-made Langstroth hive boxes and set them out in a secure location near good food sources. We maintain hive colonies all over the Bay Area, from Bolinas to Saratoga and everywhere in between. In this way, wild, local bees become useful pollinators in family backyard gardens and at small organic farms, creating natural honey from pesticide-free flowers.
If you are a small farm or have a bee-barren neighborhood garden and would like to host a hive, please contact us. We make all the equipment and housing structure, do all the maintenance and inspections, and all you have to do is maintain your bee-friendly plants. You'll even get some very-local honey out of the arrangement.
Seventy-five percent of swarms don't survive their first winter, primarily due to starvation. A swarm must find a new home, create frames of honeycomb and fill each cell with enough food to last until flowers bloom again. This is why we harvest our bees' honey only when they have more than enough. All profits go directly back to the bees, as we are a non-profit California RTC Charitable CCN #8054228.
Here's a great article on Kalev.com if you want to learn more about why we do what we do, and with input from one of our founders.
We are dedicated to capturing feral bees and relocating them into mutually beneficial habitats. The world is a better place when bees are allowed to thrive and pollinate in organic farms and neighborhood gardens, rather than stow away in residential rafters or sneak through the crack in your ceiling skylight.
If you find yourself in the midst of a swarm of ten thousand bees, relax. Bees swarm when they've outgrown their hive, stuffed themselves with honey and taken to finding a new home. Without a hive to defend, they're not likely to sting. If they need to be captured, this is the easiest time to do so. Once they find an empty space behind your bathroom wall, they're not going to leave even if you ask nicely.
You can ask us nicely and we'll remove them. Swarm removal from a garden box or tree in a yard is free, done with a bee-friendly vacuum that gently removes the bees without hurting them. We have plenty of experience, equipment and skills to minimize yours' and your neighbors' fears.
Removing honeybees living inside structures is a whole other story. We can remove hives from inside residential rafters and other easy-to-get-to places with minimal structural impact for a small fee. For more complicated cut-outs, we'll refer you. Our professional colleagues have extensive experience removing colonies from tall hard-to-reach sites, such as many-storied retail structures constructed of impenetrable cinder block. So please don't spray! Save the poison chemicals for yellow jackets.
Once dislodged, we house the wild bees into one of our hand-made Langstroth hive boxes and set them out in a secure location near good food sources. We maintain hive colonies all over the Bay Area, from Bolinas to Saratoga and everywhere in between. In this way, wild, local bees become useful pollinators in family backyard gardens and at small organic farms, creating natural honey from pesticide-free flowers.
If you are a small farm or have a bee-barren neighborhood garden and would like to host a hive, please contact us. We make all the equipment and housing structure, do all the maintenance and inspections, and all you have to do is maintain your bee-friendly plants. You'll even get some very-local honey out of the arrangement.
Seventy-five percent of swarms don't survive their first winter, primarily due to starvation. A swarm must find a new home, create frames of honeycomb and fill each cell with enough food to last until flowers bloom again. This is why we harvest our bees' honey only when they have more than enough. All profits go directly back to the bees, as we are a non-profit California RTC Charitable CCN #8054228.
Here's a great article on Kalev.com if you want to learn more about why we do what we do, and with input from one of our founders.